Life in the Country. Botany and Books.

The English Air by D.E. Stevenson

The English Air by D.E. Stevenson ~ 1940. This edition: Farrar and Rinehart, 1940. Hardcover. 317 pages.

My rating: 9/10

I liked this novel a lot. It’s hard to believe it was written at the roughly the same time as the melodramatic Crooked Adam (1942), as it is a much more sober and thoughtful sort of thing, reflective no doubt of the author’s own musings in the years leading up to the start of World War II. It is wonderfully atmospheric from start to finish, and the characters pleased me greatly, from the gorgeous blonde Aryan “super-man” and ex-Hitler Youth Franz to fluffy-but-ultimately-wise Sophie and fragile-seeming but tough-as-nails Wynne.

This book is fairly common, and I don’t want to spoil it for those of you still to read it, so I’ll keep this review brief and avoid any spoilers.

It is the spring of 1938, and half-German, half-English Franz has suddenly invited himself to stay with his English semi-cousins, the Braithwaites. No one is quite sure what to make of Franz’s out-of-the-blue advances, and when he arrives their initial reaction is uneasy. Franz is a tall young golden-haired “Greek god” figure of a man, with stiffly formal manners and no apparent sense of humour. After the initial whispered consultations: “I wonder if he’s a Nazi? Don’t talk about politics!” everyone unbends a bit, and as the days pass Franz is seen to make a real effort to find common ground with his English hosts.

Especially lovely Wynne, the Braithwaite daughter, who has been tenaciously trying to get through Franz’s Teutonic reserve while educating him in the niceties of the English sense of humour, common slang, and recognition of and appropriate responses to friendly teasing.

But Dane Worthington, Wynne’s uncle, who has been her legal guardian since her father’s untimely death, cocks a cynical eyebrow in Franz’s direction. Why is he really so keen to immerse himself in English domestic life? For Dane knows, through certain connections of his own, that Franz’s father is a highly-placed official in the Nazi party, and one of Hitler’s personal advisers.

There are many secrets afoot, this golden last summer of peace before the start of the war…

A rather nicely plotted story – though we do get some major clues throughout as to what is really going on – and well up there in D.E. Stevenson’s oeuvre. The themes are serious and treated with respect without being dreary; in places this one reads rather like an O. Douglas novel, unsensational and matter-of-fact, and deeply appealing in a quietly memorable way. Occasionally things slip into melodrama, but all in all the author does a grand job here; it is one of my new favourites of the many DES stories I’ve now read.

I particularly enjoyed the author’s discussion of patriotism, and thought it well-balanced and insightful, though by the time of the writing of Crooked Adam in 1942 the mood had obviously changed to something much more reactive and extreme, on both sides of the ongoing conflict.

The English Air was finished in February, 1940, and, as well as being a diverting light novel, is an intriguing eyewitness snapshot of a specific time and place in the last year of peace and the first year of war.

Worth tracking down! It did seem to me that this was one of the easier to acquire DES titles, but I may be mistaken. They do command some fairly wild prices unless one stumbles upon a deal here or there.

This is in my top ten DES books. That it was written in 1939-40 is especially intriguing, giving it an immediacy that no book written post-war could possibly have. DES and her people had no clue what the future might hold.

So many characters with so many viewpoints on the last war, the current peaceful times, and the stirrings of the war to come. Tant’ Anna, cousin Elsie (in retrospect) and Sophie, one of my favourite DES characters.

And it’s all presented in the day-to-day thoughts and lives of ordinary people as they move towards and into war.

I agree, Susan. This is top rank among the books I have read by this author. And my husband and I were just discussing it last night, about how the time of its writing, in that last year of peace, is such a captured-in-time vignette of how people were thinking and feeling before the escalating horrors of the war. *We* look back and we see the whole picture; DES and her characters are truly poised on the brink, and *we* know what is coming, though they don’t. It gives the novel a poignancy and a unique value from a historical perspective which nothing written after-the-fact could have.

And it’s a very good novel for its genre. (Which I can’t quite define. DES stands rather alone, doesn’t she?) Marvelous characters, and for once DES nailed her ending beautifully with a plausible and well-paced resolution.

I should probably up my rating. The more I think about it the more I realize how deeply appealing on so many levels this book is.

Obviously, I’m delighted that you enjoyed this! I think it is one of DES’s best, combining both the wonderful comforting essence of DES and a more insightful, intelligent tone that she seems very comfortable with but sadly underutilized in her other books.

[…] not really a Century book, because its year, 1940, is already filled with D.E. Stevenson’s The English Air, but hey! – an extra book isn’t such a bad thing, and this one is short and not at all […]

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These “Reviews” and Ratings

I am merely a reader, a consumer of books for amusement and personal instruction, not a professional reviewer - and that is indeed a worthy profession, an important literary craft - so these posts are merely meant to be one person's reading responses, not scholarly reviews.

Early on in this blog I began rating the books I talked about on a 1 to 10 scale; it was meant to be a quick way to communicate my personal degree of satisfaction/pleasure (or the opposite) in each reading experience.

To emphasize: These are very personal, completely arbitrary ratings. These are merely meant to be a measure of the book's success in meeting my hopes and expectations as a reader.

5 & higher are what I consider as "keepers", in various degrees. A 10 indicates that I can think of no possible improvement. Ratings under 5 are rare & I struggle with giving those, but in all honesty sometimes feel them appropriate for, again, undeniably arbitrary and very personal reasons.

Each book is rated in its own context, NOT in comparison to the entire range of literature, which would, of course, be an impossible task.